antp.be forum

I'm not sure it's a bug, but it is a problem that has suddenly developed with my catalog (v 4.2.0.2) that now stores 3800 titles: each time I try to open the catalog, the process slows down to a crawl at 70% stage. Then it continues to load in one percentage point increments till it gets to 100%, and then it gives me an "Out of memory" message.

This is certainly not a hardware issue (see system specifications below): I get the same error on my second machine, at exactly the same stages. So basically I cannot open my main movie catalog and I'm lost without it!

I've three catalogs: the main one with 3800 titles, and two secondary ones with 400 and 150 odd titles. The problem affects only the 3800 title catalog; the other two open perfectly fine.

System specifications:
1. Intel Core i5 2500K 3.30 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
2. AMD Phenom IIx4 965 3.40 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Windows & Ultimate 64 bit

I would appreciate any help or suggestions on this: it's simply not possible to manage a 3800 title collection without the catalog. Could touching 3800 titles have triggered the issue? If yes, is there a solution or a workaround? Are there others who are working with similarly large AMC files? My catalog file size is 330 MBs.

In order to do anything with the catalog I first need to open the file and I cannot find any way to do that at the moment

That's a rather big catalog (using external pictures help in such case), but it shouldn't fail with such error.
It is possible that the file became corrupted.
Check if you have a .bak file located in the same folder as the .amc file : rename that file to another name with a .amc extension and open it, you should find your catalog from before the last time you modified it.

Thanks, Antoine, that helped me recover the file, and the recovered file is working perfectly fine so all is well (and keeping my fingers crossed that I don't run into something similar anytime soon!).

It is a sign that it is wise to make backups from time to time, in case next time you can't recover using that file
(not only due to a software bug, but a disk crash or computer crash is possible too...)

Will do a weekly backup after this episode: those hours without catalog access nearly had me tearing my hair out!